It’s all about the “narrative”

Role Playing Gaming is cooperative story telling. The Game Master sets the stage and lays out the basics of the plot. The players fill in much of the rest. The dice decide much of what happens. There is a saying amongst gamers the “dice don’t lie”. Whatever they decide is truth in that gaming world.It may be truth but is it a good story, one that is worth telling? It is one of the game master’s jobs to weld what he or she has built, what the player decide to do through the actions of their characters and then how the dice fall into a flowing story. This can be extremely difficult if the players roam off into an unexpected direction or if the dice land in a totally unlikely pattern. It is a place where thinking quickly will be of prime importance in many cases. In other it might signal a break in the action while the game master regroups and looks for threads to rebuild their story arc.

In any of these cases the game master’s primary concern should be narrative. How can a story with the events that have happened be told?